Abstract
The introduction of heterogeneous wireless mesh technologies provides an opportunity for higher network capacity, wider coverage, and higher quality of service (QoS). Each wireless device utilizes different standards, data formats, protocols, and access technologies. However, the diversity and complexity of such technologies create challenges for traditional control and management systems. This paper proposes a heterogeneous metropolitan area network architecture that combines an IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh network (WMN) with a long-term evolution (LTE) network. In addition, a new heterogeneous routing protocol and a routing algorithm based on reinforcement learning called cognitive heterogeneous routing are proposed to select the appropriate transmission technology based on parameters from each network. The proposed heterogeneous network overcomes the problems of sending packets over long paths, island nodes, and interference in WMNs and increases the overall capacity of the combined network by utilizing unlicensed frequency bands instead of buying more license frequency bands for LTE. The work is validated through extensive simulations that indicate that the proposed heterogeneous WMN outperforms the LTE and Wi-Fi networks when used individually. The simulation results show that the proposed network achieves an increase of up to 200% in throughput compared with Wi-Fi-only networks or LTE-only networks.
Highlights
I NTERNET traffic is expected to increase three to five times over the three years due to the growing number of connected mobile devices
In the case of a client node with both long-term evolution (LTE) and Wi-Fi devices or HetNode, optimized link state routing (OLSR) [13] is employed to create a routing table for the wireless mesh network (WMN); it selects the default mesh gateway based on two parameters: the distance to the mesh gateway in terms of hop count and the number of heterogeneous nodes associated with the mesh gateway
This paper has introduced a new heterogeneous network architecture in which LTE and Wi-Fi wireless devices are utilized to benefit from the bandwidth of each transmission technology
Summary
I NTERNET traffic is expected to increase three to five times over the three years due to the growing number of connected mobile devices. LTE networks employ licensed frequency bands, and to provide more bandwidth, an additional cost is introduced to either buy more frequency bands (which may not be available in all regions) or invest in a higher density of base stations. Another promising wireless architecture for the generation of wireless networks is wireless mesh networks (WMNs). To enable communication between WMN and LTE networks, a new routing protocol is developed that defines a set of routing tables that is necessary to allow packet exchange between the two different networks.
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